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Will Motorola Rise From the Ashes?
Posted by
Zonk
on Wed Mar 26, 2008 05:03 PM
from the comeback-kid dept.
from the comeback-kid dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to ZDNET the once almighty Motorola is going to split into two companies, 'If the split goes through as planned, what will remain will be the "broadband and mobility solutions" business, which includes enterprise mobility, government and public safety, and Motorola's home and networks divisions.' Engadget claims to have an insider's email that details where it all went wrong, paying particular attention to mismanagement at the highest levels. What makes all of this even more of a shame though is that Motorola's latest product lineup seems to be receiving critical acclaim but with the company in so much termoil, will it ever rise out of the ashes?"
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The Real Motorola Split in the 90s (Score:3, Informative)
The second split in 10 or 15 years.
The problem with Moto is that they were always good at engineering, but not good at asthetics. Now they are good at asthetics, and sometimes engineering.
Re:The Real Motorola Split in the 90s (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:The Real Motorola Split in the 90s (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:The Real Motorola Split in the 90s (Score:5, Interesting)
The company I worked with at the time was a competitor of Motorola in the cellular handset market, and so we reviled them for their chutzpah in patenting RF power control and modulation schemes, but their micros and their automotive power semiconductors were awesome back in the day.
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This wouldn't be Slashdot without a minor nit-pick: Apple went with Motorola chips later in their life, but until the late eighties most of their CPU choices were from Commodore (specifically their MOSTEK subdivision), with variants of the 6502 used for the Apple I, II, III, and the various successors to the Apple II (IIe, IIc, GS, etc.) Only the Lisa and Apple Macintosh had Motorola CPUs.
I "learned" assembler on a Z80A and then learned assembler on a 6809 via the Dragon 32 CoCo clone. Amazing chip, an 8
Re:The Real Motorola Split in the 90s (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, it may be interesting to see what would happen if Motorola split "for real" just as Agilent split from HP.
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Re:The Real Motorola Split in the 90s (Score:5, Informative)
Hey! Speaking of which - guess what she's doing now [huffingtonpost.com]! Yet another reason to avoid McCain like the plague!
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Actually, it's the third split. Motorola spun off it's semi-conductor division in 1999. Business Week article [businessweek.com]
Wrong, yet modded +5 Insightful (Score:5, Informative)
Fact check please. [wikipedia.org]
Ah, but it was said with such certitude...
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Re:The Real Motorola Split in the 90s (Score:5, Insightful)
My experience there was there was a lot of ideas being bounced around, and anytime one idea caught traction, Motorola would pander it around, loose interest, and sell it off to someone else to make a fortune on. Eventually, as Zander came on, Motorola drastically scaled back R&D, shutting down whole divisions doing hard science. Then, it came to pass that all R&D projects had to have a 'buyer' in one of the profit making sectors, which led to a scramble amongst the engineers. Suddenly folks were backstabbing one another to try to get a project that GEMS or mobile devices wanted done. I once tried to get the specs on a product that we were supposedly trying to hawk to consumers so I could extend the functionality, only to be ignored or strung out waiting for info. The constant 'fires' I had to put out just to get work done were grating.
I'm not surprised in the least about all this. The writing was on the wall when SPS split off into Freescale. Motorola just refuses to leverage any core competency at all. It's all about being tragically super cool to sell products.
I think mobile devices will tank unless they get someone in there to beat it into shape. GEMS, or what's left of Motorola now, will hang in only because they already have massive infrastructure for gov't and etc. If someone else got into this market, Motorola would be gone.
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Critics? (Score:2, Insightful)
WTF do critics know? It's what the market wants that counts.
Test of time (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Test of time (Score:5, Insightful)
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One thing caught my eye (Score:5, Insightful)
The sad thing is that this is way too common in American corporations today. Someone much smarter than I(I think it was in the Economist) remarked that the modern day American CEO doesn't get to the top because they have vision for great products, they get to the top because they are connected and are great at playing financial games. This makes for great short term gains at the expense of any sort of longevity(but by that point the CEO has his golden parachute and is long gone). Carl Icahn also lamented at how woefully out of touch the modern American CEO is, and how much their exorbitant salaries and total lack of accountability and vision make American companies so topheavy they are quickly becoming uncompetitive.
Motorola thought that it could farm everything out and somehow just sit back and reap the benefits of others labor. It was wrong, and yet others are lining up to jump off the same cliff that they leapt from....
Re:One thing caught my eye (Score:5, Interesting)
Since then, I've had a very dim view of CEOs and the games they play. I've gotten to the point where I think that a number of companies succeed in spite of their CEOs, not because. Not only that, but the only time that CEOs are held accountable is if they've done something criminal. Being merely incompetent and raiding corporate coffers is enough to get awarded an 8 to 9 figure severance package. Personally, I compare it to someone joining a WoW guild, raiding the Guild bank for everything that's worth anything, and then being handed everyone's gold as an incentive to leave the guild. Despicable doesn't even come close to describing what I think of thse CEOs.
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I can tell you this: after decades contracting in companies from small to enormous, I cannot recall a single project that failed due to lack of technical ability. It was almost always a management problem - whether project management or higher up. So many times I've said something point blank to the effect of "If you do that it will cost you in the end", and watched the heads nod in understanding and agreement. Then they proceed to do exactly what I warned them against. Then later they bitch about "why is t
Re:One thing caught my eye (Score:5, Insightful)
We now seem to be a shell of our former selves. Companies cry to the US Government because of unfair competition, even when most people on the street know what the CEOs don't. The reason why you're doing poorly isn't because the other countries have an unfair advantage, it's because you've adopted myopic views. Profit is created through accounting rather than actual value. Investment in future is disregarded, marketing is key. When you do develop a strategy that works, you take it to the Nth degree, ignoring that the market doesn't need 20 colors for their RAZR or an SUV that can tow a building. It's become all style over substance. Lee Iacocca once ran advertisements for cars of "if you can find a better car, buy it." We need that confidence again, not flags flying in the background and an "American Revolution"
At some point we need to stop this slash and burn style of management, or we will falter. Let's accept that we have competition and we actually need to try, that we can't go on forever simply by chanting "We're so great", we need to shut up and let it be implied by our actions.
For those who want an interesting look at the current situation, spoken better than I can do, I'd refer you to Mr. Iacocca's except from his latest book. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17516.htm [informatio...house.info]
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Index tracker funds are the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
These funds only attempt to match a particular index, so they have no reason to invest resources to to maximise the profits of companies that they own (or rather, to prevent abuses that reduce stockholder value). Resources to work with companies that they hold cost money and these funds try to match the indix as closely as possible with minimum overhead.
Hence, there are large stockholdings in the hands of entities that really don't care. That's part of the re
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Re:One thing caught my eye (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why we end up with companies like Chrysler hiring the former CEO of Home Depot as their new CEO. What in the hell does a home improvement retailer have to do with an automobile manufacturer? To these people everything is "product". It's an abstraction with no bearing on reality. This why they're so quick to outsource. It's why they're willing to dump obscene amounts of money into marketing instead of research and development. American companies seem to take more pride in "inventing" a brand than they do in producing a real product. Everything always comes off as a gimmick to sucker people into buying their products.
I think Motorola is plagued with the same problem as many other American companies face. They're looking for that one big hit. Instead of following a path of patient improvement and building the overall portfolio they bank everything on a single product. In the process they neglect everything else. When they do come upon something popular they then proceed to milk it to death. The media doesn't help with all their gushing on how the company has turned around their fortunes. They rest on their laurels and when consumers grow tired of the product they find themselves struggling all over again.
I expect Motorola to keep plodding along as they have in recent years. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if they decide to outsource their entire mobile phone business. More than that, they'll dump their design and R&D departments and instead just buy crap hones directly from the Chinese market and rebrand them as Motorolas. The twit responsible for this will be touted as an innovator. Some day the Chinese will realize they don't need American companies and start selling to consumers directly.
When it comes down to it, American companies are quickly turning themselves into nothing more than middlemen. I wouldn't be so bothered by what these CEOs earn if they actually contributed something of substance to these companies. Unfortunately they seem to exist only to make themselves and their shareholders wealthy.
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There. Fixed that for you.
Abstract skills (Score:3, Interesting)
I've gotten the impression that one of the big reasons why American companies run into all these problems is because executives and management all have business or economic degrees.
Bob Nardelli (the fellow you used as an example) joined GE in 1971 as an entry-level manufacturing engineer. I think you would be VERY surprised at the diversity of backgrounds in top management. Yes many do have business degrees but there is a good reason for that. If you don't understand finance and accounting you can NOT run a major corporation. Finance and accounting are to managers what math is to physicists or reading is to, well... anyone. You can't get far without some kind of training. It ca
Whats "termoil" (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Whats "termoil" (Score:4, Funny)
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Note to self: Don't drink when reading
Goodbye, Moto (Score:5, Insightful)
But so what?
In the US market, consumers have taken it as given that whatever interesting features a manufacturer builds into its hardware, the carriers will either disable them outright or make them into carrier-branded pay-per-use features.
Camera? Pseudo-GPS location services? Directions/navigation? Local restaurants? Even something as simple as using your PC's desktop wallpaper as a background image is pay-per-use. Web browser? Nope, pay-per-byte. Music/Video? Nope, browse your carrier's licensed pile of top 40 crap. Better mic/speaker for actually making phone calls? Nope, it's all compressed down to underwater-quality-burbling by the carriers anyway.
This situation isn't unique to Motorola; carrier lockdown has made wireless phones a commodity, and has threatened all manufacturers. What's the difference between a Motorola ABC or a Nokia XYZ when every potential differentiating feature has been disabled by every carrier?
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Then you havent been looking too hard! Sure you can set your own web bookmarks, but they're in a subfolder that is always closed, at the bottom of TMobile's huge list of 'standard' for-pay bookmarks that you cant change. And that default web search? All results are redirected through TMobile's servers, selective search results for pay, graciously replacing ads with their own, reformatting content, and generally messing with web operations for their own p
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Re:Goodbye, Moto (Score:5, Interesting)
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While there is some truth to the tired meme you're promulgating, it's not all as gloomy as your trolling makes it sound.
It'll fragment along the lines of demarcation (Score:2)
Management and Leadership (Score:4, Interesting)
Desperate measures such as the breaking up of a business is always a big indication that no one has a clue what to do and that people who don't understand what the business does have taken over.
Re:Management and Leadership (Score:4, Insightful)
When you have $100 million in the bank I'm pretty sure you really don't care what label you have to wear. That is the fundamental problem with the current system. Most execs, especially in America, are just looking for the big score to get their FU money. They will do anything to get it including completely cratering the company they are running. There are people like Jobs, Ellison and even Gates who are/were looking to build sustainable empires, but most execs are just climbing the ladder until they make the big score and they could care less what kind of devastation they leave in their wakes or what people think of them after. If they can milk some underlings and be successful and get even richer they will but if they actually have to be smart and work hard to succeed.... why should they, they know they will still be rich when they get cashed out so why not just be a jet setter, party and screw the pooch.
The preventive measure against this is supposed to be a board of directors who keeps an eye on the execs and make sure they do the right thing for the long term health of the company and shareholders. But most boards are now so incestuous that they are just there to not make waves and get as much FU money out of the deal too. If you get all your friends on your board and you serve on their boards you develop a system where there is no accountability. At the end of the day its only big shareholders like Icahn who have huge stakes in the company that can enforce any accountability. Unfortunately its really hard for someone with a 5 or 10 percent of the stock to do anything unless shareholders band together and elect new boards. The only problem is shareholders aren't really interested in the well being of the company either, they often just want to pop the stock price so they can cash out and make some more FU money.
The only really good companies are the ones built from scratch where the executives are the same people who risked everything and worked hard to make a company out of nothing, are huge shareholders, and to whom the company is something they built and cherish. They wont do stupid, destructive things because they have their skin in the game. Its the rock star CEO's that are the cancer. They walk in the door and are handed huge stakes in companies that they did nothing to build and nothing to earn. They could care less if they destroy it as long as they cash about before it craters.
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Frustrating Shame (Score:5, Informative)
It was obvious to me when Apple announced the iPhone that MOTO was going to have a problem on its hands in very short order. Although the pricing made it unaffordable for Joe Sixpack, it was immediately apparent that Apple had, at a single stroke, completely redefined the cell phone experience. Every mobile product that was more than eight months from release should have been killed immediately, and all the freed up personnel should have then stared at the iPhone demo video for two weeks straight until the UI principles became ingrained. New design ideas could have then flowed out of that. It could even have been done inexpensively.
Had they done that last year, they would have had new prototypes to show by now, they could have started generating buzz, and could have remained relevant. Now, it will take a hugely expensive effort to keep the division -- possibly the entire company -- afloat.
Schwab
Re:Frustrating Shame (Score:5, Funny)
So you're to blame!
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Can't go bankrupt fast enough... (Score:4, Insightful)
The "i1000 plus" flip phone where the most gentle use would irreparably break the flip cover (which was not available to the service centers as a repair part)
The "i58sr" which had no screws holding its boards together (so required a weekly drop to the floor to reseat the connectors inside) and made such a loud "BEEP" in your ear when Nextel dropped a call (i.e. constantly) that I threw one through a car windshield. I had people across the room turn their heads and say "Ouch" when the thing would make that sound - I suspect it permanently damaged my hearing. Nextel's service people disavowed any knowledge of the beeping, and referred one to Motorola. Motorola said that nobody had ever reported this problem before, but then acknowledged that they had no actual way to know if anyone had ever actually done so, since they had no bug tracking or ticketing system (I used to call in about once a month to see if they'd fixed it yet). Finally a Motorola guy said that it was definitely a problem, but that Nextel had insisted they add the beep to let users know the calls were dropped, then told the service people to lie about it.
The "i315" with a smaller screen than the i58sr, but the same text strings in the firmware (so most of the menu items are wider than the screen and are only visible with line scrolling). The developers seemed to have gone through the firmware and deleted any items which were actually useful, such as "Alarm Clock", while adding a digital unit-to-unit radio which only works if you have the cell phone and walkie-talkie functions _disabled_ - a.k.a. a completely useless feature which never made it to other handset models.
At this point in my life, I wouldn't take a Motorola product - ANY Motorola product - if they paid me to take it - and Nextel has tried repeatedly. (I remember some poor Sprint telemarketer bravely going through her script offering me more and more Motorola junk as I told her more and more how much I despised all things Motorola and Nextel.)
The minute the FIC FreeRunner is available, I'll toss Motorola and Sprint/Nextel to the curb and never look back. And I'm just a _cellphone_ user - imagine the poor police/fire/rescue folks who are stuck with Motorola digital radios which don't work inside buildings, and which automatically deplete their batteries if they also carry a cellphone...
Sales & Revenue, but not the profit (Score:3, Insightful)
As soon as losses were reported this year, the stock started its downward spiral. Although frankly, this also reflects modern business that caters to stock more than sustainability (or the comfort of resting on your past success), where any company is only as good as their latest quarter.
It's certainly not the first time a tech company was mismanaged into the ground despite a healthy position in the market.
Free the Motorola 68000! (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, Motorola would be trivial to turn around. I could manage it in a fraction of the time it would take most executives to, and I'm cheap at the price. So could many geeks who have a similarly broad-based background and no patience with waffling. (Waffling should be left to waffle irons.)
Of course, no geek capable of running Motorola will ever be offered the job. We're far too outspoken, way too radical, most (myself included) have never been contaminated with a Harvard business degree, and most (again myself included) have managed to avoid managerial roles because we can't stand having zombies as co-workers. (Holy water supersoakers aren't enough.
Motorola won't hire anyone dangerous enough to succeed. And this is a mission where you need someone who is dangerous, a wildcard, unpredictable. You don't hire a banker to pull off a commando raid, you don't hire a businessman to rescue a disintegrating corporate giant. If they had any sense, they'd be looking for a troublemaker. They WANT Motorola to cause trouble. Causing trouble means they're still breathing. This troublemaker must be able to come up with novel, irrational, but totally brilliant solutions to the current engineering problems. Only problem is, The Doctor doesn't like being pinned down like that.
There is one other option, which has a better chance of success. Start a new company, a company that, businesswise, should logically not exist, that makes no sense given current attitudes, but sells like nothing else. Then openly and outright offer each and every (decent) engineer at Motorola the option of jumping ship. Don't buy the IP, buy the workforce. What's Motorola going to do? Sue each person individually over non-compete? And will the courts even listen to such a case if Motorola isn't producing anything worth a damn to compete with? Yes, it's playing with fire, but look at every single brilliant engineer, every single brilliant company owner, anyone who has ever truly risen far enough above the masses to see anything worthwhile - they all played with fire, in the most insane and dangerous ways possible. And they made it work for them.
Brilliant Roll Model (Score:4, Funny)
The problem with Motorola (Score:4, Informative)
I think there were few major problems with Motorola: 1) going everywhere, but ending nowhere, and 2) lately trying to find a hit product instead of churning out good products.
Now you might be asking what I mean by saying going everywhere, but ending nowhere. Well simple, Motorola always had more than one technology always in production and in planning. In operating systems front they first went to Symbian, then started their Linux project and in the same embraced Windows Mobile. Now compare this to Nokia that just concentrated to Symbian, no Linux, no Windows Mobile. Only lately Nokia has introduced Linux based Internet Tablets just to gather some experience, but they still are 100% committed to Symbian. In my opinion Motorola should have committed to Symbian as strongly as Nokia and Sony-Ericsson did, maybe allied with Sony-Ericsson in using UIQ.
The second problem with Motorola relates to first problem. As I said Motorola jumped everywhere in their search of finding a hit, as can be seen in operating systems front. The front where Motorola really failed was in introducing new phones. They had a hit with RAZR, which created an illusion that they were onto something. In reality they just had luck, and what they should have done, would have been to introduce tens of different variations of the phone. Now compare to Nokia witch doesn't really have hit products, but instead it has a large collection of small hits and fairly trading phones. When I just looked at Nokia's European web site I counted that they have 92 phones/devices available. Motorola really should have copied Nokia's formula on doing few platforms and customizing them rapidly and introducing countless of different phones with short life cycles.
Now, it might seem to some sad that Motorola is spinning their cellphone division out, but then again that might be the best option to take. When the cellphone division are their own company, they will concentrate into a one thing and a one thing only and either succeed of fail. I think a good example of this would be Sony-Ericsson where both Ericsson and Sony spinned their mobile phone divisions, and after the spin out the company has succeeded fairly well.
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Nokia having more sales than the other handset manufacturers can be attributed to many things including economies of scale in component buying, manufacturing, sales, research and development etc.. However it should be remembered that Nokia hasn't always been the biggest mobile phone manufacturer. When we start to examine on how they achieved their position as the number one and how they have retained it, I would strongly look on how Nokia plays with phone variations.
I myself think that having large number
The slow sad decline of Motorola (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I think that the Six Sigma movement was what started Motorola down the road to ruin. The entire management structure became fixated on playing the Six Sigma game, and lost sight of actually watching the competition or designing new products. Six Sigma became the perfect management circle-jerk. As the digital revolution in cell phones began, and cell phone networks spread throughout the third world, Motorola management was too busy computing error statistics for Six Sigma presentations to realize that their product line and the planned Iridium satellite system were already obsolete.
One event in particular sticks in my mind from the Schaumburg visit. During one presentation, a Motorola manager showed an org chart of the "old" Motorola, and then an org chart of the "new" Motorola, and assured everyone that Motorola was going to be back at the forefront of communications technology in short order thanks to the new corporate reorganization. The problem was that if you took the old org chart and rotated it 90 degrees, it looked exactly like the new one. Everyone I was with had a good laugh about that on the way back to the airport.
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Both my mom and dad once worked for Motorola, no not making cell phone stuff, or embedded CPU's, they made televisions on an assembly line. That's right, televisions. My mother in particular made degausser coils. Then all of a sudden they were told that the factory had been sold, to some company called Matsushita that no one had heard of, but has dome minimal brand awareness as Panasonic. Matsushita then had Motorolas Quasar brand to use for themselves, be